Posts Tagged ‘fantasy’

I don’t talk about any spoilers in this post, but spoilers are allowed in the comments!

Since a few people have asked me already, I just saw How to Train Your Dragon 2, and I loved it. It is a wonderful expansion of the world and deftly sidesteps many of the pitfalls of a lot of sequels.

It’s a darker film (befitting the characters’ age), bigger without being an assault on the senses, and gorgeous to look at (and listen to).

I’ve said before that the first one is a “perfect” movie, inasmuch as any movie can be. I could nitpick about a few things (exposition-induced pacing issues in one scene, a clunky line in another, etc.) but there is so much done well — so much done perfectly, really — that I really feel like I need to see it again to solidify my opinions about it.

In any event, this second film in the series was an intense, emotional, and action-packed adventure movie featuring characters many of you already love. What the hell are you waiting for?

If you’ve seen it, tell me what you thought below! But be warned: spoilers are 100% okay below.

I’m not going to watch this, since I’d like to go in as blank as possible with this movie (so I’ll thank you not to blurt out anything spoilery in the comments below, despite it being in a trailer), but…

When Keanu Reeves was announced as starring in a new take on the story, it was immediately obvious that it wasn’t going to be a historically faithful version. Then we started hearing about “witches and giants” and I guess they’d decided to chuck all realism out the window. The results look alright, I guess, but a little too heavy on that bland, plasticky big-budget action-adventure CG look that Hollywood has been cranking out too much of lately.

The film also stars Hiroyuki Sanada and Rinko Kikuchi. It hits theaters on December 25th this year — in 3D, of course.

I think most people who saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would agree that it was overlong and a little too video gamey in some of the action scenes. Tolkein purists will object to the addition of Legolas… but they probably haven’t been on board with much about this trilogy (and some didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for that matter).

Well, what we see here in this first trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug looks a bit like more of the same, but at least we’re past the slow, introductory bits and into the meat of the story, so perhaps it will be more fun. In any case, as a movie tech nerd, I’ll see it for the high frame rate, which I thought looked wonderful outside of some very brightly lit scenes (a shortcoming of the cameras Jackson used, not high frame rate as a technology, I think).